nwg

Hello Folks,

Its pretty clear that the Multi Player (MP) ETW community is suffering rather than really benefiting from the plethora of ETW mods that are available. Mostly these mods are 'mini' mods, which is to say that they change one specific thing or add something very specific such as new uniforms, or flags, or better musket sounds, etc, etc.

The problem is that unless each player in a multi player game is running the exact same mods then the game will either not start or will crash shortly after starting. Organising this in an ad-hoc way is just a nightmare and has proven now to be an un-winnable battle.

To this end I'd like to promote maybe 2-3 or 4 mods within NWG that have enough MP interest to be successfully fought on the rather lacklustre Steam 'lobby'. To do this with any sort of success we need to detail which collections of mods are favoured and how _exactly_ players must set their systems up in order to be compatible with each other.

Note that this is not a contest for the 'best mod', I've got no interest in that sort of discussion myself. Once we've been able to gauge the interest in the various mods that are already available we might have a poll to select the 3 or 4 with the most interest and the NWG will then write up wiki pages for each which describe how to get them working in a consistent way.

Best regards, Moopere

I'll kick off the discussion with a couple of obvious candidates:

- Empire Tactical Warfare (eTW): http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=260024

- Darths Mod (DM): http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=1126

- The Rights of Man (TROM): http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=259213

Each of these can benefit from a nice subset of extra mini mods (maps, skins, sounds) but I'll list these separately at a later time. The important thing is that we agree on the collections of major and mini mods and use these for MP play.

Moopere

Well i for one do not know of anybody regularly playing MP games with any mod other than Tactical Warfare.

All the Napoleonic enthusiasts i know are either struggling on with vanilla or have been converted to Tac War now that we settled on using the same version for a minimum 4 week period.

There is a small Darths MP community as well. Appears to me to be more ad-hoc than the eTW crew as the eTW players appear to me to be 100% old NTW2 players, no new blood at all so far as I can see...

I wonder why that is?




I think the 4 week MP release period has been the best thing to happen to ETW MP. People want to play games not faff about Partly this is what this thread is all about, less faffing and more gaming

I know the old NTW2 MP community in the GMT timezone (plus or minus an hour or so) are getting regular games with eTW but I'm getting very few which is my timezone talking I understand that. Vanilla much as I hate it is my only realistic chance to get any MP ETW time in.

I've posted before that I think one of the factors that might be limiting eTW takeup is the faffing required to move from MP to SP and back again. Mod Manager makes this all a lot easier I must admit but there are lingering issues.

For MP _and_ SP play I've found TROM quite interesting as I've previously posted, the challenge is really to let more people know that TROM, via Mod Manager, can be played in MP perfectly well. Likewise with Darths Mod, it tends to be used SP but has an MP community which just needs a bit of structure to help it through - thus the potential for the NWG to help and provide clear instruction.

One thing which is a problem for MP play using mods that were really designed for SP campaign play is MP pricing. The campaign mechanics and system require much lower pricing and this causes silly issues in MP. However, I am happy enough to work with whichever mods are proven most popular to try and hack out decent MP only pricing (its kept separately in the data files) which would then mean that you could use the same mod for MP and SP play without any faffing whatever!! Imagine!!!!!!!!

Cheers, Moopere

Sure has, now the Grogs and the Celts are all getting it installed. I don't re-call any vanilla results being posted on CaW.

Not true fella

There are a number of players not from the old community, some playing occasionally and some regularly

I believe that Napoleonic II Total War Is the best Napoleonic Mod out there. The uniforms are the most accurate and the tactics are the best ever. The only flaw is the lack of a campaign. Napoleonic II Total War:9 stars out of 10

Emperor Napoleon X
Actual Marquis of Aragon[/img]

I agree with you ENX. However, I posted this original message in the Empire section because a lot, probably most, of the community is interested these days in playing ETW and ETW mods.

However, there is still a strong following for NTW2 in the NWG membership, and we cater to everyone here. Maybe there is some useful stuff here:

http://nwg.wikispaces.com/Napoleonic+Total+War+2

Which is the front of our wiki page that relates to NTW2 and community added mods and content.

Best regards, Moopere

Ja, fair enough. I should have mentioned "in my experience" which is a pretty small subset of the overall NWG eTW experience I realise.

Cheers, M.

Righto, heh, not much interest in ETW Mods it seems. How about I tackle this in a different way?

I'm sure that the NWG would be a good foundation for anyone with a playable ETW Mod to put up instructions on how to install and use whichever mod it is. Mod authors whom almost invariably live on the TWC (Total War Center: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=470) are not always particularly good at describing what is required to make their mods work and are very often more interested in a single player gaming experience rather than the multi player experience that most here prefer.

In SP or campaign games its not at all important how many mods you use, in MP its vital we all use the same combination of mods, so we need folks to champion specific mods by agreeing to create and/or maintain instructions and files on the NWG wiki page here:

http://nwg.wikispaces.com/NWG+Empire+To ... +Home+Page

We are obviously a reasonably small community, a hundred or so in total, so we'll not be well served supporting 20 different mods but I doubt this will really become a problem. If we end up with 3-4 or more hosted mods then we'll deal with that problem if it comes up.

Empire Tactical Warfare Mod (eTW) in its August distribution is here: http://nwg.wikispaces.com/Empire+Tactical+Warfare+Mod

probable its going to get a September update so we'll need someone to take on the duty of keeping the install instructions and files up to date.

Regards, M.

OK Moopere i will do that, just give me a little nudge if necessary

Thanks DJ.

I'm going to do up a page on TROM which most regulars will know I think has a lot of potential as an MP game. Its one of the big guns of SP/Campaign play but lacks proper MP pricing (I'm going to try and fix that!).

M.